Frances Bula

Scott Jacob has worked in construction for 30 years. He’s seen a few recessions. But never the kind of meteor hit that happened last March, when pandemic lockdowns and panic arrived in B.C. The company he and his brother run, Jacob Bros Construction, had a dozen contracts for various improvements—parkades, asphalt aprons—at Vancouver International Airport. They were cancelled instantly, stopped mid-project with an urgent request that Jacob get his crews offsite as fast as he could...

Blaine McNamee had already brought the dead back to life once in B.C.’s retail world. Then the pandemic came. McNamee is the guy who took over the empty storefront that had been home to the cherished Wonderbucks on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive—an...

Emad Yacoub has survived downturns before. It was very rough during the 2008 world meltdown triggered by the collapse of the U.S. housing market. But even in the worst of times, his Glowbal dining empire, which today consists of nine...

Doug McCallum regained the Surrey mayor’s chair last fall by offering easy-sounding solutions when it comes to policing, transit and real estate development. The veteran politician says he’s changed along with B.C.’s second-largest city, but is he the right person to lead it into the future?

Louie Quilt hefts a sheet of drywall into a box about the size of a cabin sitting in the middle of the shop floor, the next step for what will become a compact studio apartment for a not-so-well-off resident of...

A note from the author: Modern-day elections are famous for their last-minute dramas, with candidates getting knocked out of races as problematic information emerges about their pasts, as they stumble in the public spotlight, as their campaign strategies blow up...

On April 22, 2019, Frances Bula's retirement guide won a gold SABEW Canada Best in Business Award in the personal finance and investing category. This is the fifth year for the awards, which are sponsored by the Canadian chapter of the...

We’d gone to the main plaza in Siracusa for our usual evening walk and so that I could apply my investigative skills to what is said to be this Sicilian town’s best ice cream, at Gelateria Fiordilatte. Settled in at...

Emily Plommer knew from her own experience staying at Airbnbs that it was frustrating to rent an apartment with a full kitchen and discover that there wasn’t so much as a salt shaker or bottle of cooking oil in the...

Rachel Harriman and her husband have seven times their annual household income—which is in the healthy $100,000-plus bracket—socked away, thanks to the sale of a condo several years ago along with savings from their earnings. Justin Jacobsen, who makes a...

At first glance, the new president of UBC is impossible to spot amid the throngs packed onto a plaza in front of the year-old, $107-million Student Union Building. But, looking closely at the way people have gathered on this pleasantly...

It was the winter of 2008, and Ross Beaty—a man who’d made his fortune discovering mines, then running them, all around the world—was at the peak of his career. The company he founded in 1994, Pan American Silver Corp., was the second-largest silver-mining operation in the world, with seven mines...